Friday, January 22, 2016

The Effigy Corporation

The question you should ask yourself is not whether we will get the job done, but whether you can afford us.

Dannon Trace, Effigy Corporation CEO

These are dangerous times. Ruined husks of starships
litter the solar systems and renegade pirates fight for whatever
precious resources can be found on the savage surfaces of the inner
planets. Powerful corporations wage constant industrial wars for control of the galaxy's resources and have learned to now heavily rely on hired guns and professionals to do their dirty work. The Effigy Corporation is one of those professionals and is widely considered to be one of the best mercenary outfits money can buy. The Corporation specializes in space travel protection, search and rescue operations, industrial espionage and sabotage.

Effigy's famous Havoc Squads, small teams of highly trained ex-military soldiers and specialists, are equipped with the finest equipment and weaponry currently available in the galaxy. Supported by droids and small specialist teams, the Squads have an extremely high success rate.

The "Effigy Corporation" is to be the first outfit for a Sci-Fi skirmish project I just started.

I found these figures by accident on the website of a friend who used to distribute the range in North America (sadly the range is not available anymore). I just got them on impulse and figured one day I'd find a use for them. And now is that day...

The range, started through a Kickstarter, was very small and unfortunately only a few figures were made; 5 squad members, two civilians and 3 specialists, along with some recon robots which I do not own. But since I intend on building factions of between 10 and 30 figures, it's not really a problem, although some heavy support soldiers would've been fun!

I find the figures would fit equally well in some Space Pulp, Cyberpunk or distant future Sci-Fi setting and that suits my plans very well. The sculpts were lovely although I found the very realistic proportions were a little bit challenging after all that time working on Oldhammer models!

The outfit is made up of 2 Havoc Squads, Blue Squad and Green Squad, as well as a Yellow Squad (specialists), the CEO Dannon Trace and a demolition droid. I'm missing a droid and another civilian, in boxes somewhere, but other than that this bunch is complete.

Havoc Green Squad

The first figures I painted for the project. The photography doesn't do justice to the dark green however. I love the presence of a couple of female soldiers in the squads (some seriously awesome figures) and that First Sargent pose is perfect. He screams Alpha Male ;-)

Havoc Blue Squad

After the dark green I went with a brighter colour for the blue squad and I'm very happy with the result. It's exactly the style I wanted to give to the force.

Yellow Squad, "The Techno Girls"

I quite like the middle one, a lovely figure. Havoc-TT-4, Demolition Droid

This droid figure is not part of the original range, and was sculpted by Drew Williams from the Oldhammer
Facebook page, and he graciously made it available for a limited time to the whole group. Obviously I couldn't resist! The figure was actually based of a drawing in the original Rogue Trader rulebook! Also
an impulse buy from a couple of months ago and I was looking for a way
to use him.

Dannon Trace, Effigy Corporation CEO

Doesn't he look like the perfect Corporate CEO?! You can just smell the 1%!

I really thought Crossover Miniatures had them as part of their Black Dragon line, but they seem to have disappeared from their web store. I'm a little sad to see that. I asked where the line went (I really want to know!).

I'm a friend of Rusty, the owner of Crossover. Apparently the owner of the Black Dragon line ended the deal with Rusty. The figures are no longer available, and the owner didn't seem really sure what he wanted to do with them. A real shame, as it's a lovely little range.